PowerPoint to Flash: Articulate or Camtasia?

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Someone asked this question today:

I am researching software to convert PowerPoint presentations to Flash. What do you recommend? I briefly tried Articulate, Camtasia, and PPT2Flash. Only Camtasia converted everything in the original PowerPoint slides. But the file was very large. The other programs left out font characters and had problems with animation. Any advice would be appreciated. Thanks.

It all depends on your requirements. We haven’t worked with PPT2Flash, but you can choose from one of two approaches:

1. Edit the source presentation, to work within the capabilities and limitations of the rich media converter product such as Articulate Presenter. This approach results in smaller files.
2. Use your existing presentations unchanged and capture its playback onscreen with a product like TechSmith Camtasia. This approach requires that you use a powerful system, and results in larger files.

We do this sort of work all the time in-house in our studio, and every presentation is different. We wish we could say that there is a way with which you can attain one-click nirvana as far as your PowerPoint to Flash conversion needs are concerned. But that’s not the case today.

Articulate does a great job, but as you have discovered they don’t replicate the PowerPoint model entirely. We normally suggest that you do a quick conversion with Articulate Presenter, and then tweak the areas that don’t get converted too well. This normally involves changing some animation styles, and some more fine-tuning. Using Articulate Presenter again after this housekeeping will get you better results.

With Camtasia, try to reduce your computer resolution to 1024 x 768 pixels (or even 800 x 600 pixels) and then do the capture. Since Camtasia has to work with a smaller area, this results in better captures, and files with smaller output sizes. Camtasia 4 does a much better job with the sound capture than earlier versions; this is important if you have narration within your PowerPoint presentation.

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